Home – Home – Jornals – "Philosophy of Education" 2010 number 4

The giddy process of the specialization of sciences represents a double menace to our civilization: on the one hand, most of us are excluded from what is the characteristic achievement of the modern age (Trilling) because we are not able to access knowledge that is too esoteric; on the other hand, as Ortega y Gasset emphasized 80 years ago, the barbarism of specialization threatens the truth of science as culture.
How to preserve the link between science and the encyclopaedia of thought (Ortega)? This pivotal question evokes a more radical one: is there a relationship between science and thinking? What can this relationship be? What is science in so far as (and if) it is related to thinking?
In order to investigate this issue the paper examines Heidegger's momentous saying science does not think. Comparing Heidegger and Kuhn, it is maintained that science does not think exactly to the extent that it is research, but that nevertheless it is constantly related to thinking as to its original ground.
In this sense it becomes crucial that science education is inspired by a philosophical approach. In contrast to the most widespread perspective, a philosophical approach is not meant principally as an analysis of the concepts and of the logical cogency of the theories but as an investigation into the process of the constitution of scientific notions out of the Lebenswelt. Exactly by doing away with the oblivion of the rootedness of scientific notions in the Lebenswelt, exactly by re-discovering the latter as the ground of science it is possible both to ward off the disappearance of science into the mere manipulation of formulae and to provide that ground shared by the ordinary don, the educated technician, the average citizen which the physicist Gerald Holton invokes in order to narrow the divide between science and culture. In the final part of the paper it is argued that this rediscovery implies dwelling in the pedagogical dimension of science, that is in science as part of human Bildung.